The NPD Group has done a great job of keeping the press up to date on the …

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Every month, we receive a nice e-mail from the NPD Group detailing the sales numbers for each of the major gaming consoles, as well as the top-ten list for software sales. This information always makes for an interesting read, as does the analysis done by the NPD Group. These numbers spread like fire through the forums and gaming sites of the Internet, and many have looked forward to the middle of the month update to see how their favorite game or console was doing. Those days are over, however, as the NPD Group has just confirmed that the sales number will no longer be given to non-paying parties—including the press.

Ars contacted the NPD Group to get the full story. "At this time last year, it was made very clear that NPD will provide media with [hardware] sales figures, but that it would only be temporary. As you may recall, we never provided these numbers until November 2006, the first month when all three new consoles were on the market," David Riley of the NPD Group told us. "It's been a year, so it's time to pull back. It's better to pull back and leave it up to our clients to release their numbers. Or, if manufacturers tell us it's okay to release their hardware sales numbers, then we'll go back to providing them, but that shouldn't be our call."

His comments make it sound as if this were the decision of one or more of the major console manufacturers, so we look forward to seeing which console makers decide to share their numbers—and which decide to keep their sales to themselves. This is a sad day for fans though—without the NPD Group providing a third-party look at the sales of each console, it will get much harder to put together an accurate look at the state of the market.